Month: May 2018

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Our growing season is starting very late this year. We still don’t have mushrooms growing at the farm! In town though, we have a jumbled pile of dried up old logs hanging out in the side yard. This last week one of those logs produced our first shiitake of the year. I spotted it one morning on my way to work and spent all day thinking about how to eat that one mushroom. Unfortunately, the squirrels were considering the problem too and they beat me to it. I came home to find a third of the mushroom stolen away! I wanted that mushroom too much though, so I trimmed the mushroom, gave it a wash, and threw it in a tiny little scramble. It was amazing. Thank you squirrels for not taking the whole mushroom!

Remove stems from mushrooms and chop. Heat a small skillet or frying pan on medium high. Add 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil to the pan and heat. Add mushrooms and saute for a minute or two. Add ham (if using) and cook for just a minute or so till it’s warmed up a bit. Add the egg, chives, and cheese all at once. Stir and mix until the eggs are all cooked. Voila!

It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue (well, unless you’re us and you’ve been saying it for 9 years). We’ve heard, and answered to, a lot of variations over the years:

Cherry Treehouse Mushrooms

Cherry Tree Mushrooms

Cherry Mushrooms

Treehouse Mushrooms

Besides being long and a bit unwieldy, the name hasn’t really matched us well for years. We chose the name when we started growing mushrooms at our house in Minneapolis, which we called the cherry tree house. Full story here. As difficult as the name is, it has been more difficult to think of a new name. We’ve had numerous conversations over the years that usually devolve into silliness or fizzle out as we realize we just can’t come up with something we like better. A recent conversation went something like this:

Jeremy: Okay, let’s take this back to the beginning. We’re starting a farm! Isn’t this exciting? What are we going to call it? Something with “mushroom farm” in it.

Aimee: Why?

Jeremy: Because we grow mushrooms.

Aimee: Why?

Jeremy: Because…I like mushrooms.

Aimee: Why?

Jeremy: Ha, ha! I hate that question.

Aimee: This is the best conversation ever!

Jeremy: We did mushrooms because goats weren’t legal in the city when I started the farm!

We went on thinking about how else we could define the farm. Does the name need the word “farm” in it? Should we use a word that would show our location, like “Clayton Mushrooms Incorporated,” or something with Blackbrook? Apparently that’s the name of a creek nearby…but of course there is also already a Blackbrook farm! Well, our farm is in Polk County. Nope – we will not have the word “Polk” in our farm name! We need something evocative, something that feels woodsy. I guess it should have “farm” and “mushrooms.” (I know what you’re thinking: “why?”)

We searched blogs and sites online with various lists of “easy steps for naming your farm” which weren’t really easy and didn’t really help us pick a name. I liked the idea of picking a name that was funny.

Jeremy: Our name can’t be funny.

Aimee: Because you have no sense of humor?

Jeremy: You got it.

I am happy to say our marriage survived this conversation…but we haven’t quite come up with a name. At one point Jeremy was sure we had come up with THE new name. But a few days later, we were both feeling lukewarm about it. I said to Jeremy, “Of course this new name doesn’t roll off the tongue and sound great. It’s not the name we’ve gone by for 9 years. It’s going to be be weird and hard to get used to a new name!”

But the time really has come to re-name. We’d like to ask you, our supporters and fans, to let us know what you think. Here are some of our ideas. Let us know in the comments, or drop us a line, or comment on Facebook: which name(s) do you like the best?